Talking It Out
by writer314
Summary: Steve and Bucky go to Sam's group at the VA. One-shot. I was going somewhere with it, but I lost it... stands well enough on its own.


**A/N: This is a small 'what if?' ficlet. It's a oneshot, because I lost wherever it was I might have been going with it. Still, I think it stands on its own, and if someone has an idea where it could go, I'd be willing to entertain a collaboration.**

**Potential trigger warnings: symptoms of PTSD are discussed, not described. Shouldn't trigger anything if the movie (CA: TWS) didn't. But you know your brain better than I do. Trust yourself.**

**Spoilers only if you're the last person on the planet who has yet to see CA: TWS (c'mon, even my mom's seen it).**

"Hey, Sam?"

"Yeah, Cap?"

"Would it be okay if I came to that session you were leading down at the VA, you know, the time I met you there to make you look cool to the woman at the front desk?"

"Sure, Cap. You having nightmares about last month?"

"Not so much. The last war? Definitely."

"I didn't know, Steve. Yeah, sure. Meeting starts at 9, okay?"

"Thanks, Sam. Oh, and I might be bringing my friend. If I can talk him into it."

Steve hung up the phone before Sam could protest.

The first time, Steve went alone. He wanted to make sure the stories wouldn't trigger an 'episode' for Bucky, where 'episode' was defined as curling into a ball, sobbing uncontrollably, and shivering so hard a passerby could be forgiven for thinking he was having a seizure. Yeah, Steve wanted to avoid that. Steve just listened to the stories, not adding his own. He was pretty sure the others thought he had come to see Sam, as he had done before. That was fine. He was working against a lot of cultural conditioning even to consider sharing his nightmares, but if it would help Bucky on his road back to being Bucky (or even a reasonable approximation), he would share every last one. He had lost too much already to let a little thing like pride get in the way of getting back his best friend.

The second time, Steve and Bucky get there early, so Bucky can choose where to sit. He's still hypervigilant, and chooses a seat at the back with lines of sight to all the possible entrances to the room, away from the vulnerabilities of the windows.

Steve is not surprised. He just gets each of them a cup of sludge pretending to be coffee, and takes it back to his friend.

"You still drink it black, right?" he says as he sits.

"Drink what?" Bucky frowns.

"Coffee." Steve hands Bucky one of the cups.

Bucky sniffs the beverage as if it might bite him, and finally tries a sip. He frowns again. "This is awful. It's worse than the crap we made from burned toast crumbs that summer."

Steve bursts out laughing. "I had forgotten all about that! We were working our way through the Horatio Hornblower books and mom wouldn't let us try coffee, so we tried the 'recipe' in the book! I haven't thought about that in years."

"Well, you were frozen for most of that time, so I'm not sure that's significant."

Steve laughed again as the group members filed in, some giving Bucky odd looks of half recognition.

Sam came in just before nine, and strode to podium at the front. "Okay, just a few reminders for everyone, so the newer folks feel included. First, what is said in this room stays in this room, absent a threat to harm yourself or someone else. Second, the first time you speak to the group each session, please tell us your first name, but only your first name. We maintain the fiction of anonymity here. Third, each of us suffers differently, so speak from the 'I'. You don't know how someone else feels, because, even if you were there, you didn't experience the event the same way. Now, would anyone care to begin?"

The conversation flowed around Steve and Bucky for almost an hour before Steve decided the time had come. At the next lull, he stood and said, "Hi, I'm Steve. I have nightmares, but they're not about the people who were trying to kill me. Most of them were just doing their jobs, like I was. And I've come to realize that many of them were just average men defending their homeland, not willing participants in the atrocities their superiors were committing. My nightmares are filled with the times I didn't do my job well enough. I recruited my best friend into an elite unit. I brought him into an extremely dangerous mission. I got him killed, or at least blown out the side of a train. But I couldn't reach him, and the bar he was holding broke off the train car and he fell. When I sleep, I can still hear that scream sometimes."

When Steve had finished, there were some coughs, and a few shuffling feet. The other veterans knew exactly who had just spoken, and most of them were torn between utter disbelief that Captain America could have something so mundane as PTSD and a sense of relief that if Captain America had PTSD, too, at least they were in good company.

Bucky stood in the silence. "Um, I'm James. My problem is that I don't know what I've done. And I don't know who I was before I did what I did. And I'm not sure, really, who I am now. I'm not sure I want to know what I've done, because it had to be truly awful, or it wouldn't have needed to be erased. Even so, I want to know, because my imagination is trying to fill in the blanks, and that's even less pleasant. At least if I knew, I could try to, I don't know, make amends somehow. And, for the record, I chose to be in that unit, to be on that train, to pick up his damn shield. Okay, I didn't choose to fall, but that's not his fault either, no matter how guilty he feels about it. Even if it were, I think the beat down he took trying to convince my malfunctioning brain that I knew him made up for it already."

At this point, one could have heard grass growing or paint drying, the silence was so total. As James' words registered, the group members realized that he had survived a fatal fall from a moving train and decades longer than he should have. And he didn't look significantly older than Steve.

At last, Sam cleared his throat. "Well, I think that's about our time for this week. Just remember, you're not alone. Each of you has the phone number of at least one other group member. Use it if you need to. Sharing the load makes it lighter. Have a good week."


End file.
